The old priest in my hometown, Père Français, used to say in his sermons that sin is all around us, that we must gouge out our eyes and cut off our hands if we fall into temptation. He also used to proclaim that devils slither across the earth like serpents, pretending to be God’s children. “We must choke them with our rosaries,” said he, raising his meaty fist, his eyes a cloudy blue, “and cut off their heads with our swords.” He was a soldier in Christ’s militia, that Français, and I wanted to fight alongside him. The thing is, though, I didn’t have a sword to behead my devils. Not when I was twelve, not when I was living in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, not when I was sleeping in my father’s wine cellar, hiding from the devil of my house—my eldest brother, Alexandre. I had a wooden rosary, but Père Français forgot to mention that they snap easily.
I found this out the hard way, when Alexandre found me one evening scrunched up behind a barrel of vin rouge meditating a Sorrowful Mystery. He dragged me out of the shadows by my ankles and put all of his sweaty weight on me. With an Our Father on my lips, I wrapped my rosary around his neck and twisted until his black eyes bulged out of his head. I was so good at my twisting that he clawed at his throat like an animal in a trap, but my confidence broke when Alexandre gripped the crucifix, pulled, and snapped my rosary in half. The beads flew everywhere, losing themselves in the darkness. That’s when he gripped my neck and squeezed, slamming my head against the stone floor.
“Whore!” he screamed.
In his eyes, I was a slut, which meant that I was a sinner, which meant that I fell into temptation, which meant that I should have gouged out my eyes and cut off my hands as soon as I fell. However, it was hard for me to pinpoint the temptation that turned me into a sinner. There was nothing tempting about the feeling of my brother’s hands on me. So I was more confused than convinced that I was a whore.
I could not believe him. I refused to believe him.
I now accept that I am a whore, though. What I mean is this: I am twenty-years-old, I live in a brothel with thirty women, and I open my legs for any man as long as they pay me. But I don’t think much of the name “whore” anymore. Not as much as I used to. I used to hate how thick it rolled off the tongues of my clients, how greatly it struck shame into my body, how much it made me remember Alexandre’s hand on my neck. Now it doesn’t faze me. I let it enter me the way I let the men of Marseille enter me—without response. I’ve learned not to react to discomfort. I’ve learned not to think at all. I do my job best when I don’t think.
Most of Père Français’ homilies don’t apply to me anymore. They are for the pious and the young. I do cling to one principle from his preachings, and it is this: Put the Lord into your work. I bring Heaven to men daily. I consider myself an angel for my carnal virtue.
Angel is my whore name. Madam Lucie and the others insist on calling me Angel because of the scapular I had on my neck when I arrived at the brothel. “Religious?” she asked while showing me my chamber.
“Used to be,” I muttered.
“The Lord does not protect souls like us.”
“Didn’t he love Mary Magdalene?”
She snorted. “Love is a strong word.”
Even without the scapular, I was a lamb. A quiet, white-as-milk sheep with rosy cheeks. I make love like a lamb, too. That is my gift in this profession. If a man is looking for a flower to pluck and stick his nose into, I am his daisy. “Some men like it rough,” Madam Lucie informed me. “Others like it gentle. You are the gentle kind, ma rose. Enchant, entrance, deceive.”
So I deceive with my looks every evening, when all the candles in Marseille are blown out, and the rich husbands of wealthy wives come flocking to our maison close like peacocks with all their pageantry. Madame Lucie makes us women stand around in the salon at the beginning of every night, some of us naked, some of us wearing silk dresses. I like wearing silk. It enhances my innocent-appearance.
“Heads high, backs straight, ladies!” Madame Lucie commands. “We want to give these boys a party!”
Boys. I cannot help but smile a little whenever she refers to them as children.
And in they go, the men of Marseille, eyeing us up like poultry in a window. Some are round, some are thin. Some are balding, some are covered in hair. Even so, they are pigs with francs in their pockets. I watch a man in his forties enter the brothel, his linen shirt clean and white, his pockets abnormally large. He isn’t unattractive, either—black hair, soft eyes, a sharp jawline. His money and cock are mine tonight, but I don’t want to come off desperate, so I wander the salon, swaying my hips, grinning sweetly at the ground, casually glancing up at the man every-so-often across the room.
It takes him a few minutes to notice me. However, he eventually catches my gaze. His eyes glow in my direction, and that’s when I know, I have hooked him like a fish. He strides over to me with his hands behind his back. I end my wandering, leaning against the balusters of the stairs leading up to the chambers. My skirts move up my legs like snakes.
He stops a few inches away from me, gripping the baluster behind my head. “You’re a pretty one,” he starts.
I curtsey. “Thank you, monsieur.”
His smile widens, revealing a few gold tooths. “How much do you charge for four hours?”
Four hours! I blush hard. “Ten francs.”
The man digs into his pocket and plucks out ten francs. He seizes my left hand and puts the silver coins in my palm, closing my fist around them. “Whatever you say.”
“Come.” I take the man’s hand and guide him up the stairs into the hallway of open chambers. The moans of prostitutes and men bounce off the thin walls, reverberating in my ears. I don’t like looking inside these chambers, at the naked bodies rolling on the beds. I do like hearing the moans, though. Sometimes, a piggish grunt or fart slips out between the noise, and that gives me something to laugh about inside when I am tangled with a client in my own bed.
“What’s your name?” My client asks, releasing my hand and putting his on the small of my back.
“You can call me Angel.”
“I don’t like that name.”
I turn to him and smirk. Blunt bâtard. “What would you like to call me, then?”
“What’s your real name?”
My heart skips a beat. I haven’t said my real name in two years, since I entered the brothel. I have to preserve myself in some way, don’t I?
“Jeanne,” I lie.
“Jeanne. I can fuck a Jeanne.”
I don’t bother asking what his name is.
We make it to my chamber at the end of the corridor. “Make yourself comfortable,” I announce at the entrance, rolling the straps of my dress off my shoulders. The man sits at the edge of my bed, unbuttoning his pants and untying his linen shirt. I go to my armoire and open the right bottom drawer, where a bottle of vin blanc, a steel blade, and a crust of bread sits together.
I throw the coins in there and take out the bottle, raising it over my head. “Thirsty?”
“No,” he replies dryly. I hear him stripping on the bed. I spin around and tilt my head, surveying the man up-and-down. He’s now completely bare, in all of his hairy glory.
I take a swig of wine. “Guess I don’t need to warm you up at all.”
“Wouldn’t have come here if I wasn’t warmed up already.”
I take another swig of wine. “I better get warmed up, too, then.” I slip off my nightgown and stride to him, fully exposed. When I’m standing in front of him, he puts his hands on my hips and buries his face into my stomach. “Maybe you can help me warm up,” I giggle.
He kisses the skin above my navel and raises his head, his eyes meeting mine. “I’ll warm you up,” he responds slowly, squeezing my hips, “but first I want to talk.”
“About what?”
“About anything.”
I tousle his slick hair. “Are you here for a conversation or for me to ride you?”
“Both.”
It’s not unusual for a man to wander in here and be in a chatty mood. All men love hearing themselves babble, but their wives and children? They grow tired of their babblings fast, choosing silence over words. We may be whores, my sisters and I, but we are also warm bodies with ears, and to be frank, we like to get lost in the words of the rich at times.
“Okay,” I say, lowering myself into his lap.
The man half-smiles and nods his head, adjusting my body so that his manhood is touching me.
I bite my lip and return his smile. “What’s on that mind of yours?”
“How did you become a whore?”
My smile fades. “Do you really care to know?”
“I wouldn’t be asking the question if I wasn’t interested.”
“I guess you’re right,” I respond. How do I make myself sound pathetic? “Let’s see.” As I begin my story, I massage his shoulders.
“I was eighteen when I left my hometown Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. Do you know the place?”
The man laughs, his muscles melting in my hands. “Of course.”
“I wanted a change of scenery, a change of life. So I ran away.”
“Ran away where?”
“Here.”
“Must’ve been a long journey.”
I dig my fingers deeper into his flesh. “It was. I would pay travelers on the road to take me with them. When I came here, I had nothing. No establishments offered me work. I became a street beggar.”
“Did you think about entering a convent?”
I scoff. “A convent?”
“They would’ve taken in someone like you.”
Someone like me? I laugh up a deep, throaty laugh. “I don’t belong in a convent.”
“That’s not true.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at these hands.” He seizes my wrists and waves my hands in the air. “You’re telling me that these hands have never held a rosary before?”
I loosen my wrists from his grip and smirk. His comment takes me back. “I was a good Christian. Once.”
“Once?” He repeats.
I place my hands on his chest and push him down on the bed. “I used to attend Mass, go to confession, receive the Eucharist.” I grind on his manhood. A soft sigh escapes his lips. “Not anymore, obviously. But I am not an athée. I believe in a maker and taker of souls.”
“Is that right?” He breathes.
“Do you believe in God, monsieur?”
He closes his eyes, too caught up in his excitement to answer me. “Mhm.”
“I believe that God chooses certain people to carry out his wishes, regardless of piety.”
“Mhm.”
“I am chosen, you know.”
His eyes pop out of his head. “To do what for God? Birth bastards?”
I curl my hand around his thick neck, lowering myself down so that our noses kiss. “To clean up his messes.”
A yell sounds from one of the other chambers. An old man’s yell. Five seconds pass, and the voice cuts to silence after a loud thud. My client’s eyebrows furrow into a dark line. He tenses up beneath me. I peck his lips to soothe his mind.
“Don’t worry,” I say, “that’s Camille. She gets carried away with her rope.”
“I see.” He swallows his anxiety. “Do you have rope?”
“No, monsieur. I have something less-biting for us tonight.”
Before he could respond, I swiftly snatch a pillow from my bed and slam it against his face, smothering him. He thrashes about, kicking his legs, trying to push me off him. I can hear his muffled screams for air through the pillow. He is strong. However, I have trained to extinguish the life of wretched men like him quickly and mercilessly. As he fights, I press the pillow onto his face even harder, pushing until his thrashing slows, and his body goes completely still like a fallen tree.
Yells multiply across the hall, a chorus of men falling under knives, ropes, and pillows. My colleagues call it the sound of justice. I call it the sound of divine will being fulfilled.
Our maison close sits above a sewer tunnel. An hour or so before daybreak, we women of the night wrap our clients in white sheets and drag them into the murky waters of the earth where they belong. Lamps in hand, we watch them sink with our heads bowed in a row, some of us splattered with blood, some of us clean as doves. Madame Lucie is in front of us, wearing a deadpan expression. She no longer resembles a fifty-year-old woman, but a military general.
She points to Colette, a thirty-year-old redhead with a nag for slitting throats. “What was your man?”
Colette bares her teeth, lifting up a severed hand with gold rings studding its fingers. “A stingy aristocratie.”
Madame Lucie turns to Adeline, a woman my age with black locks, a sly cat with nails as claws. “What about you?”
Adeline tosses her hair back and raises up what can only be perceived as a man’s cock. “A cheating husband.”
Madame Lucie finally locks eyes with me. “And you?”
I raise my eyebrows at my mistress and pull out my client’s tongue from my cleavage. “A prober.”
Samantha Szumloz is a poet, fiction writer, and pop culture penner gaining a Bachelor’s in Writing Arts at Rowan University. Her writings have appeared in places such as MORIA, Blue Marble Review, Halftone, The MockingOwl Roost, The Orange Rose, Belladonna’s Garden, Moonstone Arts Center, and Rawhead (forthcoming). She is also a June 2025 contributor to Blood+Honey and a July 2025 contributor to Viridine Literary. Other than writing, she runs her own publication called Art-emis Literary & Arts Magazine (Instagram: @art_emislitart). Samantha’s favorite revenge story is Inglourious Basterds.
